A protest by intervention workers at Bordeaux Jail on Saturday pressed the government to give prisoners priority in getting vaccinated for Covid, as they don’t have the freedom to manage their own social distancing inside. The government has no plans to change the current policy, which is that prisoners are treated in their age groups like everyone else.
Updates from March, 2021 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Kate
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Kate
A water main break near the 40 eastbound near l’Acadie means the highway is closed while it’s cleaned up. Sounds like it may be closed for some time.
Update: And a driver got some salty fines, as they say in French, not only for driving on the closed road but doing so outside curfew and trying to obstruct the police officer who stopped her.
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Kate
A police report says gangs in Montreal are violent and armed to the teeth although, compared to many cities this size, ours is almost comically peaceful. A sidebar looks at seized weapons and numbers 39 gang killings from 2006 to 2009 – a period of time more than ten years ago.
I’m not minimizing the potential for violence, but this kind of story can also be used for nonsense crackdowns by police, especially on people of colour. Cops should be allowed to do a reasonable job without hysteria from the media.
SMD
Perhaps a good moment to remind everybody that March 15th will be the 25th annual march against police brutality (https://cobp.resist.ca/fr/node/22244). This year’s protest begins at 5pm at Parc metro.
MarcG
Before David comes along and says something stupid about how anti-police sentiment in Montreal is a new phenomenon tied to the US somehow: the COBP has been around since 1995 and the march since 1997.
David943
. . . and he doth appear . . .
What’s tied to the US media is the salience of the issue. As police violence has decreased in Montreal, people have come to believe that it is worse than ever; the US media prompts, and our media get busy to explain how Canada has these problems too. I recently rewatched Gosford Park and the dynamic of vicarious familiarity in the servant crew struck me as not dissimilar to the media frame through which Canadians take in America.
Anyway, I turned it over in my head for a while a decided that I’m just going to keep my thoughts to myself. What I bang out on some online forum can’t capture the archness, resignation, and humor I’m trying to convey (and I think this cultural moment just doesn’t want/need it). So, I officially no longer have any more opinions on all this performative stuff.
Really and fundamentally, my revolution is about tanking property values and rents, after which I think a lot of this racial stuff.(which is really class stuff) just sort of sorts itself out.
Kate
David, you have absolutely lost me with your Gosford Park analogy.
david220
As a parenthetical from my retirement from commenting on cultural matters, I’ll just explain the Gosford Park analogy:
To us, even in Quebec but 100% in Canada, America is the big league, the way it’s supposed to be done, the false consciousness, the dominant narrative, the boss in setting cultural priorities, etc Like your servants took on the absolutely pointless dynamics, opinions, etc. that animated their masters; trying to take, or experience or imitate.
The Americans get interested in a specific sort of food, so do we. They’re politics turns one way or another, so does ours (Reagan -> Mulroney, Clinton -> Chretien, Bush -> Harper, Barack -> the prince that was promised. O’Toole will probably be our next prime minister, unless Doug Ford is. With the culture, it’s the same, with is why we’re seeing all of this argument that super left-wing Canada is a fascist utopia, just waiting to be taken down by investigative reporters explaining how ice skating lessons are racist, or whatever.
That’s the the Gosford Park false consciousness thing.
BUT, listen, I’m self cancelling, so there’s no real need to go point by point and take me down on this.
It’s out of exhaustion, but also a sense of impending victory. A project I’ve been banging on about since I’ve been an adult is well supported in Biden’s America and, so, consequently, increasingly in our call-and-response project we tend to call Canada. See, eg: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-yes-in-my-backyard-how-urban-planning-must-shift-to-meet-our/
So there’s no reason for me to continue on with this anti-American bit. It appears that my, literally life long, project is about to get imported up here from the US, and I’m very happy about it.
If anything, I’m going to encourage people to stop being so parochial and start thinking bigger. The Americans were right about how Canada is systemically racist, and that racism is why they’re so anti-development (google this, it’s both a real argument, and objectively true). Let’s call this racist scum out, and get our cities built.
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Kate
Le Devoir was allowed to visit the intensive care at the Jewish and describes the ravages of Covid and the limitations, still, of medical understanding of the disease, and why certain people are inexplicably vulnerable to it.
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Kate
A lot of fentanyl was seized at the airport last month, and a traveller coming from Germany arrested by Canada border services.
Even so, many dangerous drugs are on the streets. Services that support addicts are seeing more overdoses from the injection of drugs of unknown strength and quality by desperate users. This CTV story is a good one, being mostly an interview with François Mary, who runs Cactus Montreal and tries to keep police away from his sites.
Raymond Lutz
The opioid crisis? It “turned out pretty well” for the Slacker family too! (owners of Purdue pharma). They were giving a 14 000 USD bonus to sale representatives for each overdose case on their territory (following advices from the McKinsey management consulting firm). 450 000 deaths. The Promotion and Marketing of OxyContin: Commercial Triumph, Public Health Tragedy. OK, this is my last comment about “turning out well” 🙂
qatzelok
“Get in the Swing With OxyContin”
(From the link above, a marketing campaign slogan from Purdue’s many sales conferences)
Dominic
It’s time to decriminalize and legalized all drugs in Canada.
dhomas
Holy shit! “Get in the Swing With OxyContin” was actually a marketing tool used by Purdue. I thought it might have been qatzelok exaggerating.
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Kate
Summer 2019, a major water main beside the Ville-Marie was on the brink of exploding – not collapsing, but actually exploding, given the pressure it sustains. The orange line, the Ville-Marie, and nearby Little Burgundy would all have been flooded.
It’s interesting to know that the city’s reservoirs contain 16 hours’ worth of water, and then they run dry. Emergency warnings would’ve gone out to reduce water usage and industrial consumers told to halt operations, but that would only have eked out a few extra hours.
We were lucky – it got fixed. But the cause here is the same reason the old Champlain didn’t last. Salt from the road seeped in and weakened the structure far faster than city engineers expected.
Good story.
yannick gingras 22:39 on 2021-03-09 Permalink
yes